Attending my high school reunion, I was reminded, once again, that very few people, like Walt and I, seem to want to celebrate the start of the upcoming era. The era of Absolute Freedom. The Glorious Advent of Second Adulthood.
We have to remind ourselves, Walt and I, to ixnay on the oyjay when we talk to sentimental parents. Confiding that we have only one left, but that we’re doing our best to lure him into the car so we can drive him to Vermont and lose him at some rest stop.
We’ve given up trying to justify our attitude by recounting our parenting horror stories. The blended family debacle. The four-resentful-teenagers-under-one-roof theme we were working with a few years back.
I get that letting one’s children go under cheerier circumstances is difficult. Particularly for women, who’ve invested so much of their identities in the role of mother. From the second we give birth, even before, we are genetically encoded to become MOM, first and foremost.
So when we lose that role, when all that we have been valued for walks out the front door, we are left wondering who the hell we are.
Is it any wonder that many of us look to reclaim this role? We plug up the fertility clinics at 50 trying to get pregnant again. Or adopt a Guatemalan orphan. Or we pressure our hapless children into producing babies so we can take them on as our own.
Women do this, not because they don’t know better, but because they can’t let go.
My mother, aged 73, still has a passion for the matriarchal role. Picture Miss Ellie on Dallas, only without the pearls. She wants to be needed, depended upon, like she was when my brother and I were young. Heavy interaction with my children over the years has frozen her in 1976.
Me, on the other hand. I could hear the clock ticking when my oldest hit 15. I was cooling my heels on a bench at an amusement park when it struck me. Cast off by my children, who rightly wanted to hang with their friends without their mommy tagging along, I sensed that it was only a matter of time before I got the pink slip. No longer the three of us against the world, it was time for me to develop a life of my own.
I often wonder how marriages survive the little kid stage. I know my own didn’t. Or Walt’s. So strong is our desire as mothers to bond with our children, to put their wants and needs above all else, that we forget who we are as individuals. We regard our husbands as an extra pair of hands, shift relief, a source of financial support so we can hang with our kids, rather than the playmate he was when we first started out. We bury our faces in our children’s necks, breathe their scent in, swoon with passion, then resent the hell out of our partner for interrupting the feng shui. So much for the epoxy that cements a relationship.
But this is our chance! This is the start of Second Adulthood. The point where we get to choose how we will develop, how we will spend the next few decades of our lives. We get to decide who we want to be. “ We can,” as Gail Sheehy states in her book, New Passages, “start stripping back down to what is real, not false or copied, to uncover our own authenticity.”
Remember?
We weren’t always parents. Tired, harassed, cranky, self-sacrificing, brain dead, hypocritical, judgmental, suspicious, wounded husks of human beings.
With the current advances in our society, many of us will be blessed with another 50 years. A whole New Life. Just Think! And this time we have the substance and the wisdom and the money and the appreciation with which to experience it.
So the next time you’re feeling blue because Junior is heading off to college, think about this. You’ve done your job. It’s been—for the most part—great. There’s no need for you to be that kind of Mommy anymore. There’s a great big world out there for you to explore.
So go ahead. Burn the nest. Go out and have some fun.
